Test post – WordPress has just deleted my post when I went to publish.
Category: Announcements
General announcements
Throwing dice to generate oracles in Roman times
My last post here looked at some examples of Roman 20-sided dice with numerals on them, almost certainly used to create oracles, to discover the future. There is some literary evidence of this sort of practice, and I want to review it here.
In Pausanias’ Description of Greece 7.25.10, written in the 2nd century AD, we have an account of how a temple would use a random number generator, plus a list of oracular replies, to allow an enquiry of the god. Here is the passage, which I take from F. Graf, “Rolling the dice for an answer” in S. I. Johnston & P. T. Struck, Mantikê: Studies in Ancient Divination, Brill (2005), p.51-97; p.62. Graf rightly observes that this approach cannot have been all that common, because Pausanias has to explain the procedure:
When one descends from Bura [in Achaea] towards the sea, there is the Buraikos river and a not large image of Herakles in a grotto; he too is called Buraikos, and he offers an oracle from a list (pinax) and from astragaloi. Whoever intends to consult the divinity, prays in front of the image, and after the prayer, he takes up four astragaloi (plenty of them are lying around Herakles) and rolls them on the table. For any combination of the astragaloi, the inscription in the list gives an easily accessible explanation of the combination.
astragali are literally knucklebones, perhaps with numbers inscribed on the sides, but no doubt dice could be and were used in the same way. The astragalos was thrown, and a number from 1 to 6 produced. Graf adds:
This description contains the two main elements that make this type of oracle function: astragaloi, and a list of answers.
Pausanias’ list is lost, but in the Anatolian inscriptions, we possess an entire set of them; we just have to add the several astragaloi that were thrown, the combination of which led to the answer.
The monuments referred to by Graf are the main subject of his excellent if rather dense paper. They is a set of 17 “large and impressive” inscriptions on stone blocks, about six-foot tall and two-foot wide, in Lycia. The ruins of Termessos contain a number of these texts. The inscriptions consist of lists of answers, arranged in ascending order. Graf gives one example. The enquirer asks about a voyage that he is intending. The priest throws the astragalos 5 times. Here is one of the possible results:
Three “chians” and a six and the fifth a four: Sail wherever you wish; you will return full of joy, for you have found and accomplished everything that you are cherishing in your mind. Cypris likes you, the daughter of Zeus who likes to smile.
The “chios” is the technical term for throwing a “1” with an astragalos, so the text means that, if you throw three ones, a six, and a four, then this answer is the one.
Graf’s paper includes an appendix with a translation of the main text preserved on these inscriptions. There are various resources around the web on astragalomancy.
So these two sources indicate the approach: throw the dice, or knucklebones, and look up the result in the tables of answers. A table, perhaps of stone, with the knucklebones on it sat in front of the stones with the answers.
A further literary source for this is a scholion on Pindar, Pythian Odes, poem 4, line 337.[1] Mopsus is “drawing lots” to find out the “will of heaven”. Here is the text of the ode, for context:
But, when the flower of the seamen came down to the shore of Iolcus, Jason numbered them and praised them, every one; and, to aid him, Mopsus, after inquiring the will of heaven by noting the flight of birds and by drawing lots (κλάροισιν), right gladly gave the host the signal to set forth.
The scholia are at Perseus here. As with Pausanias, this refers to a “holy table” in the temple, on which the astragali lay, ready to be used. Graf again helpfully gives a translation of the key bits:
a. …καὶ ἐν τοῖς ἱεροῖς ἀστράγαλοι κεῖνται, οἷς διαμαντεύονται βάλλοντες αὐτούς.
there are astragaloi in the sanctuaries with which they take oracles by throwing them
b. κλάροισιν: ἰστέον ὅτι κλήροις τοπρὶν ἐμαντεύοντο, καὶ ἦσαν ἐπὶ τῶν ἱερῶν τραπεζῶν ἀστράγαλοι, οἷς ῥίπτοντες ἐμαντεύοντο.
… “there were astragaloi on the sacred tables with which they used to take oracles by throwing them”;
So this confirms the picture that we have already formed.
The inscriptions from Lycia make clear that several throws of the dice or knucklebones are combined in order to get the god’s answer. The 20-sided Roman dice in the last post would look much more impressive than a few knucklebones, while providing the same function. The large size and impressive appearance of these dice may be important. Divination is a form of charlatanry, aimed at convincing the client of something that the diviner knows that he does not know. So it is important for the diviner to appear impressive. In the same way the use of 20-sided dice in modern Dungeons and Dragons is not just for convenience; the same end could be produced by several 6-sided ordinary dice. But using these unusual dice does give an air of something special and different.
This is not just my imagination. The divination process could indeed be deliberately dressed up to be more complex than it needed to be, as is clear from the way that another ancient oracle handbook, the Sortes Astrampyschi is structured. There the name of a deity is associated with the outcome, but by an unnecessarily complex series of dice throws.
Impressive-seeming objects from Egypt, used to communicate with the gods, immediately reminds us of the magical papyri. It may be asked whether there is any connection.
A collection of papyrus books, some in demotic, some in Greek, containing magic spells and rituals was uncovered somehow at Luxor in the 1820s and passed into the hands of an Armenian adventurer calling himself Jean d’Anastasi. No doubt the books came from the tomb of some Graeco-Egyptian priest. Egypt was famous in antiquity for its magicians. The existence of dice, also in both languages, combined with our literary testimony above, suggests that the 20-sided dice were not made for games of chance, but rather for use as tools in ancient magical procedures, such as divination.
We do not possess any oracle book that expects the use of one or more 20-sided dice. But we have seen at the Anatolian temple an example where the oracles needed to combine one or more dice to get a wider range of results. Twenty-sided dice are another way to achieve the same end.
Other books of divination using lots or random numbers also exist. In his 1913 book, Greek divination; a study of its methods and principles, (online here) W. Halliday discusses a great number of them, running into the middle ages. I won’t go into any of these here.
It is interesting to reflect that these oracular books, and these 20-sided dice, may have been part of the professional equipment of a temple, or possibly the toolkit of an ancient magician.
Some more Roman polyhedral dice
A little while ago I wrote here about a Roman crystal twenty-sided dice in the Louvre, and about one ancient oracle book here, the Homeromanteion, which might have been used with it in order to predict the future. Since then I have come across some images of other ancient twenty-sided dice. As before, they seem to be used for sortilege, throwing the lots, a form of divination where the diviner predicts the future by throwing dice or other items producing a random result.
Three more such dice are in the possession in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. All of them have Greek numerals – letters used as numbers – on each of their 20 sides. It is not certain how old they are: they could be Ptolemaic or Roman. They were acquired in Egypt during the 1920s, and they all look very similar and perhaps came from the same source. The catalogue of the Museum here (with three images) adds, interestingly:
Nothing specific about the use of these polyhedra is preserved, so theories are built on clues provided by some variant examples. One unusual example uses Greek words, a few of which resemble those associated with throws of the astragals (knucklebones), and this has led to suggestions they were used for games. Another remarkable example discovered in Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt in the 1980s records an Egyptian god’s name in Demotic (the Egyptian script of these late periods) on each face. Divination – seeking advice about the unknown from the supernatural – seems to be the most likely purpose for the Dakhleh die: the polyhedron might have been thrown in order to determine a god who might assist the practitioner. Indeed, even the dice with simple letters might relate to divination: a Greek oracle book composed in in the 2nd or 3rd century A.D. refers to throwing lots to obtain a number that would, through certain algorithms, lead to ready-prepared oracle questions and responses.
Here is an image of one of the museum’s 20-sided ancient dice, accession no 10.130.1158:
The other two dice are very similar. One is also made of serpentinite, the other of faience, are here: 10.130.1159 and 10.130.1157.
Another 20-sided dice, two inches high and made of glass, was sold at Christies in 2003. Their rather meagre auction page is here, and suggests that it is Roman and 2nd century AD. On what this is based is unclear.
The Met Museum catalogue mentioned a unique 20-sided dice, which has the name of a deity written in demotic on each face. This was found at the Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt, and is now housed in the New Valley Museum at Kharga. This was published by M. Minas-Nerpel, “A Demotic Inscribed Icosahedron from Dakhleh Oasis”, in: Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 93 (2007), 137-48, with photographs, who ascribes it to the 1st century AD. An amateur page has the images, a transcription, and the hieroglyphs explained here.
It is difficult to imagine that this was NOT used for divination.
There is some literary testimony on how such items were used. I will discuss this in my next post, here.
From my diary
I’ve not written any blog posts for a while, but this is because I have been working seriously on the QuickLatin code base. The successes and failures of that effort are not of interest to others really.
One thing that I have done is to write a couple of web pages on my pages at Tertullian.org on working with legacy Ada code. Ada is a very minority interest, and even basic things cannot be found by a Google search. So I have written up a couple of discoveries. It is always useful to do so. Such bits of random information can have quite a long useful life. For instance I was slightly bemused this evening to find that one of the most popular pages at Tertullian.org this week is a long-forgotten page on how to run the long obsolete Visual Basic 6 on Windows 10.
Microsoft do treat their developers badly. Code written using their tools simply ceases to work after an upgrade or two. Backward compatibility is never taken seriously. This I have long known. I remember, years ago, writing some fairly elementary Microsoft C. I then left it for a few years, and, when I came back to it, it did not even compile with the newer compiler. But this fact has struck me again in the last week.
Meanwhile, the days are long and the heat is increasing. It feels wrong, somehow, to sit at the computer all day. As the cafes reopen, I intend to visit some of them.
A week ago my neighbour of ten years moved out . He is to be replaced by someone new. First signs are not encouraging. But encouraging or not, the task of adapting to someone new, and their habits and noise and nuisance, will have to be undertaken. I never liked this feeling of intrusion into my safe space, even in the days when I spent my weeks in hotels and naturally had random strangers in adjoining rooms. How many of us like unwanted change? Few, I would guess. Yet change is the only certainty in life. If only we all had country estates, with wide parkland around! Yet even then, at breakfast the butler would surely bring us the news that our favourite footman was to leave, that there was blight in the oaks, flooding in the meadows, a leak in the roof, and so forth. Change is inevitable, even if our capacity to cope with it varies. I shall have to take time to adjust.
Meanwhile the disruption of all our lives, caused by Covid-19, grinds away at us all, 24/7. We’re all going about our business, but we do so as if we’re carrying a sack of rocks everywhere. Even little things like masks wear away at our energy. I try to remind myself that I am not able to give 100% with all this going on. That it is important not to try. That busy people risk burn-out. That I need to allow for the strain, to schedule downtime, to consciously offload, to ask “is this chore really essential right now?” To breathe, to drift, to accept that it’s ok to do less or nothing right now, and defer stuff to better days.
Anyway, it’s summer. Shouldn’t we all try to get outdoors before the days draw in? Of course we should!
Online and downloadable: the 5th century Oxford manuscript of Jerome
We take for granted so much these days. The web has transformed the life of the researcher. But sometimes we see something and we just marvel; because we remember how things once were, only a few years ago.
Long ago, maybe almost twenty years ago, I led a collaborative project online to translate the Chronicle of Jerome. The work ends with the disaster of Adrianople in 378, and was written a year later, when everything was still in confusion.
We worked from a printed Latin text, which I scanned and placed online in a custom editor.
But it became clear, during the project, that the original work was colour coded. Headings and columns were put in red. There seemed no reason for our online edition not to show those colours. But the printed text did not report this information.
Even then, the possibilities of online access were clear to some. The Bodleian Library had a few manuscripts online, which was very unusual. So we had access to a 9th century manuscript at Merton College Oxford. But this was four colour, while Jerome’s preface only mentioned two.
However, at Oxford, in the Bodleian Library, there is a manuscript written around 450 AD. It was written within a couple of decades of Jerome’s death, which is quite amazing. The shelfmark is Ms. Auct. T. 2. 26. As it happens, I have a reader’s card for the Bodleian, thanks to my student days. So without much hope, in much fear and trembling, I wrote to them and asked if I might examine it.
A gracious reply was forthcoming. So soon after, I printed out the draft translation on paper, took my pencils, and drove to Oxford. There I was received kindly in Duke Humphries Library, and the volume was brought out. The librarian actually said that they were glad of an opportunity to bring it out of the vault. And there I sat, little old me, marking up the print-out with the colours from a manuscript that had known the days of imperial Rome.
I had already laid out the complicated text in HTML, and I had made mistakes along the way. I was amused, as I worked through the manuscript, to discover that the scribe had evidently made some of the same mistakes. You always tended to write the year numbers first; and sometimes you kept writing them too long. His erasures made clear that he had done the same.
At the time I had no real idea of just how valuable this item was, or how decent the librarians were being in letting a random chap rock up and handle it. It is probably priceless. It is an actual ancient book, written when there was still a western Roman emperor on the throne in Rome. The first hundred pages are modern, relatively – 15th century, replacing lost original pages. But then the stiff old parchment appears of the old book. The book also contains the only copy of the Chronicle of Marcellinus, which is a continuation of Jerome.
These memories came back to me today when I discovered that, at the Digital Bodleian site, the whole manuscript is online, and can be downloaded in full colour in PDF form. The permalink to the manuscript is https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/71e1863f-9c42-4461-b948-393cd976765a/. In fact I had a problem with the download, and the Digital Bodleian staff quickly fixed it (thanks Tim!).
Here is part of a random page (f.110v). The left hand numbers are the years of the ruler “of the Romans”, the right hand “of the Jews”. Tiberius appears, and the regnal years reset to 1. The Olympiad is shown also. The work is in columns on two pages, but this is the left side.
I can say, from my own memory, just how amazing this is. When I remember, less than twenty years ago, that access to this volume was basically impossible. Nobody ever saw it. But now… anybody can consult it, anywhere in the world.
It is hard to find words to say just how wonderful this is, and how overwhelming it feels, to see the PDF appear on my PC. Unbelievable; and so very, very marvellous.
A quotation from Augustine: “God doesn’t love you as you are; he hates you as you are.”
A tweet this evening:
God doesn’t love you as you are; he hates you as you are.
~Augustine
“You must be born again.”
But is it from Augustine?
In fact it is taken from M. C. Hollingworth, “Grace, confession, and the Pilgrim City: the political significance of St.Augustine of Hippo’s creation narratives”, Durham University thesis (2008), vol. 2, p.225, n.22, which is online here, but I will quote because such things vanish:
22 … Cf. Serm., IX, 9: ‘[God] doesn’t love you as you are, He hates you as you are. That’s why He is sorry for you, because He hates you as you are, and wants to make you as you are not yet., This thinking is presumably the background to Augustine’s exegesis of Matthew 7: 3-5, which features in a number of places in his writings.
Dr H. tells us that this is his own translation.
But of course we all want to check! Augustine is a voluminous writer, so something just called “Sermons” tends to make the heart sink. The bibliographical information refers to the Città Nuova collected edition of his works (contents here), to which nobody has access. (I wonder whether Italians have collections of PDFs of these things? I bet they do!)
Fortunately “Sermones” is listed in the Clavis Patrum Latinorum, as item 284, referencing the Patrologia Latina vols. 38 and 39. And so when we look at the PL38, column 82, we find sermon 9, chapter 8, and the words:
Placeat tibi Deus qualis est, ama qualis est: non te ipse amat qualis es, sed odit te qualis es.
Which is our source. The Latin for the whole sermon is online at The Latin LIbrary here.
Rather to my surprise, I find that I have on disk a copy of the English translation of this sermon, made by the “New City Press”, as part of their series, The Works of Saint Augustine: A translation for the 21st Century. This volume has the title: Sermons, (1-19) on the Old Testament. Volume III/1. It was translated from the Italian edition above by Edmund Hill, OP, and appeared in 1990. The sermon is entitled “Discourse on the ten strings of the harp”, preached in 420. The division of the chapters presumably also from the Citta Nuova edition, and disagrees with the PL text. Here is a chunk of it, talking about “Put off the old man and put on the new man”. Page 267:
Such people are often tripped by thoughts like this, and they say to themselves, “If it were possible to do this, God would not be threatening us, he would not say all those things through the prophets to discourage people, but he would have come to be indulgent to everybody and pardon everybody, and after he came he wouldn’t send anyone to hell.” Now because he is unjust he wants to make God unjust too. God wants to make you like him, and you are trying to make God like you. Be satisfied with God as he is, not as you would like him to be. You are all twisted, and you want God to be like what you are, not like what he is. But if you are satisfied with him as he is, then you will correct yourself and align your heart along that straight rule from which you are now all warped and twisted. Be satisfied with God as he is, love him as he is.
He doesn’t love you as you are, he hates you as you are. That’s why he is sorry for you, because he hates you as you are, and wants to make you as you are not yet. Let him make you, I said, the sort of person you are not yet. What he did not promise you, you know, is to make you what he is. Oh yes, you shall be what he is, after a fashion, that is to say, an imitator of God like an image, but not the kind of image that the son is. After all there are different kinds of images even among men. A man’s son bears the image of his father, and is what his father is, because he is a man like his father. But your image in a mirror is not what you are. Your image is in your son in one way, in quite a different way in the mirror. Your image is in your son by way of equality of nature, but in the mirror how far it is from your nature! And yet it is a kind of image of you, though not like the one in your son which is identical in nature.
So the quotation is indeed authentic.
Translations of Mozarabic texts at Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi
A kind correspondent has drawn my attention to a website with new translations of Mozarabic texts – Latin texts from Islamic Spain, written by a certain Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, an Iraqi living in Great Britain. The Latin text used is that contained in Juan Gil’s Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum. The site also translates a few brief late antique chronicles. The items can be found here: https://www.aymennjawad.org/articles/
I don’t know a thing about texts of this period and area, so I will quote:
At some point, [the author] started translating various Mozarabic texts, such as those by St. Eulogius of Cordoba about the Cordoban martyrs, and all the weirdness with Bishop Elipandus of Toledo (the guy who did a good job against the weird Davidic heresy of Migetius, but espoused his own version of Adoptionism; and then got snitty when called out by Beatus of Liebana and others).
Most of the items at the website are concerned with present day Jihadism – of no interest to us – but it is really useful to have this Mozarabic material.
Eusebius, Letter to Constantia – an English translation by Cyril Mango
It’s always a shock to realise that some important early Christian text has never been translated; or, at least, is inaccessible online. Such was myi feeling on seeing a quotation from the letter of Eusebius of Caesarea to Constantia, sister of the emperor Constantine the Great. The quotation was:
To depict purely the human form of Christ before its transformation is to break the commandment of God and to fall into pagan error.
The letter has not reached us directly. Rather it was quoted as part of a dossier of texts assembled by the iconoclast synod of Hieria in 754. In turn so those sections were also quoted in the acts of the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 AD in order to condemn them. Other fragments exist, apparently.
I find that a translation of the material from Nicaea 2 was made by Cyril Mango from the PG 20, 1545 f. text, and printed in The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312-1453 (1972, rep. 1986),p. 16-18. Here it is:
You also wrote me concerning some supposed image of Christ, which image you wished me to send you. Now what kind of thing is this that you call the image of Christ? I do not know what impelled you to request that an image of Our Saviour should be delineated. What sort of image of Christ are you seeking? Is it the true and unalterable one which bears His essential characteristics, or the one which He took up for our sake when He assumed the form of a servant? . . . Granted, He has two forms, even I do not think that your request has to do with His divine form. . . . Surely then, you are seeking His image as a servant, that of the flesh which He put on for our sake. But that, too, we have been taught, was mingled with the glory of His divinity so that the mortal part was swallowed up by Life. Indeed, it is not surprising that after His ascent to heaven He should have appeared as such, when, while He—the God, Logos—was yet living among men, He changed the form of the servant, and indicating in advance to a chosen band of His disciples the aspect of His Kingdom, He showed on the mount that nature which surpasses the human one—when His face shone like the sun and His garments like light. Who, then, would be able to represent by means of dead colors and inanimate delineations (skiagraphiai) the glistening, flashing radiance of such dignity and glory, when even His superhuman disciples could not bear to behold Him in this guise and fell on their faces, thus admitting that they could not withstand the sight? If, therefore, His incarnate form possessed such power at the time, altered as it was by the divinity dwelling within Him, what need I say of the time when He put off mortality and washed off corruption, when He changed the form of the servant into the glory of the Lord God. . . ? … How can one paint an image of so wondrous and unattainable a form—if the term ‘form’ is at all applicable to the divine and spiritual essence—unless, like the unbelieving pagans, one is to represent things that bear no possible resemblance to anything. . . ? For they, too, make such idols when they wish to mould the likeness of what they consider to be a god or, as they might say, one of the heroes or anything else of the kind, yet are unable even to approach a resemblance, and so delineate and represent some strange human shapes. Surely, even you will agree that such practices are not lawful for us.
But if you mean to ask of me the image, not of His form transformed into that of God, but that of the mortal flesh before its transformation, can it be that you have forgotten that passage in which God lays down the law that no likeness should be made either of what is in heaven or what is in the earth beneath? Have you ever heard anything of the kind either yourself in church or from another person? Are not such things banished and excluded from churches all over the world, and is it not common knowledge that such practices are not permitted to us alone?
Once— I do not know how—a woman brought me in her hands a picture of two men in the guise of philosophers and let fall the statement that they were Paul and the Saviour—I have no means of saying where she had had this from or learned such a thing. With the view that neither she nor others might be given offence, I took it away from her and kept it in my house, as I thought it improper that such things ever be exhibited to others, lest we appear, like idol worshippers, to carry our God around in an image. I note that Paul instructs all of us not to cling any more to things of the flesh; for, he says, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we Him no more.
It is said that Simon the sorcerer is worshipped by godless heretics painted in lifeless material. I have also seen myself the man who bears the name of madness57 [painted] on an image and escorted by Manichees. To us, however, such things are forbidden. For in confessing the Lord God, Our Saviour, we make ready to see Him as God, and we ourselves cleanse our hearts that we may see Him after we have been cleansed. . .
“the man who bears the name of madness” is Mani, of course.
According to David M. Gwynn, “From Iconoclasm to Arianism: The Construction of Christian Tradition in the Iconoclast Controversy”, in: Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 47 (2007), 225–251; 227 (online here), who discusses the letter, its authenticity and reception, further fragments may be added from the writings of the Iconophile Patriarch Nikephorus, which he references thus:
5. The best-known edition of the text is that of H. Hennephof, Textus byzantinos ad iconomachiam pertinentes (Leiden 1969) 42–44, of which there is an English translation in C. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312–1453 (Englewood Cliffs 1972) 16–18. A new Greek edition of the surviving fragments has now been prepared by A. von Stockhausen, in T. Krannich, C. Schubert, and C. Sode, Die ikonoklastische Synode von Hiereia 754 (Tübingen 2002), although in her most recent article Claudia Sode is sceptical that any coherent text can be reconstructed from those fragments: C. Sode and P. Speck, “Ikonoklasmus vor der Zeit? Der Brief des Eusebios von Kaisareia an Kaiserin Konstantia,” JÖByz 54 (2004) 113–134.
It should be noted that Mango in fact does not reference Hennephof, but the PG edition.
It has to be said that Eusebius is not really addressing the idea of icons at all. The Byzantine veneration of icons is not his concern, for this did not exist. Rather he is a man who grew up when paganism was triumphant, concerned to prevent the continuation of pagan practices in the newly Christianised populace.
Interesting to learn little snippets about antiquity – such as that an image of Mani was being paraded around in procession by his devotees. We gain something from every morcel of ancient literature.
Update: A. von Stockhausen writes:
My edition (not critical, but re-instating the fragmentary state of transmission and annotation parallels in his other works) with German translation and short thoughts on Eusebius’ position on images (interpreting prep. ev. III 10,13–19) is online here: https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bvb:29-opus4-81432
Thank you!
From my diary
I’m working on translating material associated with the council of Hippo in 393. Not just the Breviarium of the canons, prepared for the council of Carthage in 397; but also a handful of canons that survived in more complete form, more or less by accident, outside of the main flow of canon law transmission. To do so I work with various tools, including my own QuickLatin tool which I am continuously enhancing with small bits of syntactical information. But yesterday I had to stop and do some real work on the code base. I had never implemented code to handle “quidem” and the like, not least because I always know what it means. But finally this absence annoyed me enough to do something about it. Two days of hard work later, it is now functioning.
Tomorrow I will get back to working on five canons discovered by Charles Munier in Codex Vercellensi 165, fol. 199, and published in 1968 in the Revue de Droit canonique 12, p.16-29. This does not seem to be accessible, but he printed the text in his edition of the African canons which I have. I’m working through the first of these, which restrains clergy from ordaining minors without the permission of their fathers.
The manuscript is at the Biblioteca capitolare in Vercelli; which sounds like the chapter library of the cathedral. Sadly these do not seem to be online yet; but no doubt they will be one day!
Canons “37b, 38 and 39” of the Breviarium of the Council of Hippo (393)
In Mansi’s edition of the Breviarium, canon 37 is longer than it is in Munier; and there are two more canons given. Thankfully Munier does explain this, and in the interests of completeness, I think it’s worth giving the material here, to tie up a loose end.
Around 500 AD Dionysius Exiguus compiled a collection of church canons, which included a good slab of material from Africa. He gave the canons of the council of 419 and then inserted after them a digest of earlier African canons, which is referred to today as the “Register ecclesiae Carthaginensis“. The canons are numbered sequentially as if a continuation of the canons of 419.
All this material was translated by the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers collection, so there is no need for me to do so. But let’s give the Latin from Munier and NPNF English.
The extra material in canon 37 of the Breviarium is in fact from the Register, where it is canon 47. The Register states that it is from the Council of Carthage on 13 August in 397, the same council at which the Breviarium was compiled. So this is a little odd.
(“37”) De Donatistis placuit ut consulamus fratres et consacerdotes nostros Siricium et Simplicianum de solis infantibus qui baptizantur penes eosdem, ne quod suo non fecerunt judicio, cum ad ecclesiam Dei salubri proposito fuerint conuersi, parentum illos error impediat ne promoveantur sacri altaris ministri. (Munier, p.186)
Concerning the Donatists it seemed good that we should hold counsel with our brethren and fellow priests Siricius and Simplician concerning those infants alone who are baptized by Donatists: lest what they did not do of their own will, when they should be converted to the Church of God with a salutary determination, the error of their parents might prevent their promotion to the ministry of the holy altar.
From which we may infer that someone in that situation was indeed seeking to be ordained.
The “canon 38” is in fact canons 49 and 50 of the material from the Register, which also assigns it to the Council of Carthage in 397, but to a second session on 28 August.
(38) Honoratus et Urbanus dixerunt : Et illud nobis mandatum est, ut quia proxime fratres nostri Numidiae duo episcopi ordinare praesumpserunt pontificem, nonnisi a duodecim censeatis celebrari episcoporum ordinationes.
Aurelius episcopus dixit: Forma antiqua servabitur, ut non minus quam tres sufficiant, qui fuerint destinati, ad episcopum ordinandum. Praeterea, quia in Tripoli forte et in Arzuge interiacere videntur barbarae gentes – nam in Tripoli, ut asseritur, episcopi sunt quinque. tantummodo, et possunt forte de ipso numero vel duo necessitate aliqua occupari; difficile est enim ut de quolibet numero omnes possint occurrrere – numquid debet hoc ipsum impedimento esse ecclesiasticae utilitati? Nam et in hac ecclesia, ad quam dignata est vestra sanctitas convenire, crebro ac paene per diem dominicam ordinandos habemus; numquidnam frequenter potero duodecim vel decem vel non multo minus advocare episcopos? Sed facile est mihi duos adiungere meae parvitati vicinos. Quapropter cernit mecum caritas vestra hoc ipsum observari non posse.
Sed illud est statuendum, ut quando ad eligendum convenerimus, si qua contradictio fuerit oborta, quia talia tractata sunt apud nos, non praesumant ad purgandum eum qui ordinandus est tres iam, sed postuletur ad numerum supradictorum unus vel duo, et in eadem plebe cui ordinandus est discutiantur primo personae contradicentium, postremo etiam illa quae obiciuntur pertractentur; et cum purgatus fuerit sub conspectu publico, ita demum ordinetur. Si hoc cum vestrae sanctitatis animo concordat, roboretur vestrae dignationis responsione.
Ab universis episcopis dictum est: Satis placet.Honoratus and Urbanus, the bishops, said: We have issued this command, that (because lately two of our brethren, bishops of Numidia, presumed to ordain a pontiff,) only by the concurrence of twelve bishops the ordination of bishops be celebrated.
Aurelius, the bishop, said: The ancient form shall be preserved, that not less than three suffice who shall have been designated for ordaining the bishop. Moreover, because in Tripoli, and in Arzug the barbarians are so near, for it is asserted that in Tripoli there are but five bishops, and out of that number two may be occupied by some necessity; but it is difficult that all of the number should come together at any place whatever; ought this circumstance to be an impediment to the doing of what is of utility to the Church? For in this Church, to which your holiness has deigned to assemble we frequently have ordinations and nearly every Lord’s day; could I frequently summon twelve, or ten, or about that number of bishops? But it is an easy thing for me to join a couple of neighbours to my littleness. Wherefore your charity will agree with me that this cannot be observed.
But this should be decreed, that when we shall have met together to choose a bishop, if any opposition shall arise, because such things have been treated by us, the three shall not presume to purge him who was to be ordained, but one or two more shall be asked to be added to the aforesaid number, and the persons of those objecting shall first be discussed in the same place (plebe) for which he was to be ordained. And last of all the objections shall be considered; and only after he has been cleared in the public sight shall he at last be ordained. If this agrees with the mind of your holiness, let it be confirmed by the answer of your worthiness.
All the bishops said, We are well pleased.
It is shocking to read that “in Arzug the barbarians are so near”… and that Aurelius does not seem to consider this a more pressing concern than these legal minutiae.
The next item, “canon 39” is in fact from the council of 13 September, 401. It appears as canon 72 in the Dionysius Exiguus’ Register.
(39) Item placuit de infantibus, quoties inveniuntur certissimi testes, qui eos baptizatos esse sine dubitatione testentur, ne que ipsi sunt per aetatem de traditis sacramentis idonei respondere, absque ullo scrupulo eos esse baptizandos, ne ista trepidatio eos faciat sacramentorum purgatione privari. Hinc etiam legati Maurorum, fratres nostri, consuluerunt, quia multos tales a barbaris redimunt. – Munier p.201
Likewise it seemed good that whenever there were not found reliable witnesses who could testify that without any doubt they were baptized and when the children themselves were not, on account of their tender age, able to answer concerning the giving of the sacraments to them, all such children should be baptized without scruple, lest a hesitation should deprive them of the cleansing of the sacraments. This was urged by the Moorish Legates, our brethren, since they redeem many such from the barbarians.
Sobering stuff to witness.